Theory: New AI designer products marketing teams are infiltrating this sub
Case in point, both the OP as well as the downvoted comments in this thread.
What I believe is happening is the following and it may be a mix of the two:
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OP makes a post asking for something like a Landing Page generator. This is done by a human, likely the founder or SEO person for said company.
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Reply bot driven by a tool like rplyhunter, rply.io, etc. swoops in and markets the AI design generator. Censored to hopefully keep them away. These type of apps are massively popular in SaaS right now.
Why does this matter? Because unless enough human designers chime in and are upvoted for the benefits of hiring an actual designer, we’re only going to see more gigs and projects go to these tools.
A note: I’m not anti-AI. I’m a senior designer and use it daily but some of these apps are definitely starting to not only take your work, they’re gonna result in an uglier digital world of all templatized sites, brands, etc.
Proposal:
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Someone write a bot to identify the reply bots and call them out.
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Get the mods to update the rules about types of posts people can make and allow us to report it
Thanks for listening and would love to hear your thoughts.
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This sub has been targeted by some pretty sophisticated marketing campaigns lately. That guy who was claiming to make six figures a year just building websites using a handful of templates is a good example. He had me fooled for weeks.
Can you DM me the link please? I’d like to see it but don’t wanna give him/them anymore back links
Same please! I think I know who you're talking about, I bookmarked his stuff thinking it was legit?
Are you talking about the guy who has a website that rhymes with toad switch
Even if you ignore the whole design de-evolution ramifications, the code these products vomit out is complete garbage.
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edit:
If you understand how LLMs work, and are familiar with the current web dev climate it's perfectly clear why the code LLMs generate is garbage. An LLM is a very sophisticated statistical model that predicts the likelihood that one word follows another word. That statistical model is trained on large sets of data. An LLM can be expected to perform about as well as its training data.
Do you know how bad most frontend devs are at html and css? Really bad. ChatGPT has ingested enormous quantities of garbage code written by js devs who are proudly on the left peak of the dunning-kruger graph. Since that's the training data, you can expect the output to be similar in quality.
Now that's not to say LLMs don't have their place in a web design/web dev workflow, they do. Just have realistic expectations.
They’re getting better.
IDK man, we demoed figma->locofy a couple months ago. It was terrible. Beyond being unusable from a code standpoint, it would get you sued for accessibility violations if you actually put it out in the wild.
Haha that’s good to hear
I couldn't see who posted or which website are they spamming, but r/UXDesign was flooded yesterday, I think mods banned a few profiles
Good to know. I’m thinking of posting there and one other design sub but don’t want to get spammy myself
They're so lazy they don't even change the formatting of the spam accounts. They're all two random words and a random 4-5 digit number.
The replies too you can tell are templates, almost exact examples for these SaaS reply companies marketing sites.
Let them try it out I say.
If the tool solves a business problem at the right cost then it will be used and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop that.
And I never said we should stop them. I’m simply saying we need to do something to both uplift professional and expert quality design as well as prevent design subs from turning into promotional platforms for these products.
Not sure why the downvotes. The reality is these tools are just not able to do the job correctly yet. Give it time and eventually they will be closer, but without a real expert will only ever be good enough for mom and pop shops
interesting